


Ballade in the Key of Solitude

by troiing



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-29
Updated: 2013-07-29
Packaged: 2017-12-21 18:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/troiing/pseuds/troiing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been twenty-three years since Helen played the piano - another twenty-five or so before that.  Bigfoot thinks he understands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ballade in the Key of Solitude

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't get around the idea that Helen MUST have played some instrument or other at least a little, so I decided to write a piano fic. It escalated very quickly into a massive feels-fest. Here there be angst.

The piano was badly in need of tuning. Helen winced at the sour notes of her own slow arpeggio.

The grand piano was kept secreted away in one of the unused rooms of a relatively untravelled hallway in the Sanctuary, little cared for and under-appreciated, gathering dust even below the cover that made her sneeze upon removing it. These unused quarters were cleaned in Spring, but the old cathedral was much too large to tend to every room all the time. And she rather preferred that some things remained somewhat private.

She pulled the rag draped over her shoulder down to wipe gently at the keys, then laid it aside to tap away at another series of notes. The mechanism in the G above middle C was broken. Few notes rang true.

Helen had never become a proper pianist, despite hands well-suited to the task - nimble and long, with little webbing to speak of between the fingers. But her mother had ensured that she take up at least a little music, and she had learned much under her tutelage as a young girl.

She wiped dust carefully away from the piano stool.

She’d been born on the verge of the latter half of the nineteenth century, and this grand, while newer, was not so different than the one that had graced her childhood home in Oxford (though she had, of course, learned on something much smaller). She plucked another three-note arpeggio, far off in the middle - tried twice more, and found an octave where the notes were more closely matched in their intervals.

Patricia had loved Beethoven.

She repeated the arpeggio, struck the lower chord. Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor. Patricia had been among the first to call it _Mondscheinsonate_ , Moonlight Sonata, after the critic who had so named it. The song reminded her of her mother. Of course it did.

Gregory had been nothing if not a kind and loving father for all those years, rarely stern, and frequently spoiling. Patricia had been the same at heart, but the opposite in behavior. Where her father had done little but encourage his daughter’s occasional roguish behavior growing up, her mother had insisted she be educated as a proper lady. But underneath the upturned chin and the insistence that Helen be well-versed in music and art and contemporary literature, and a number of mundane household chores, she had been all heart, and it had been Patricia whose bosom Helen sought when, as a child, something had truly upset her. For all Gregory’s gestures of love and comfort, it was her mother who had held her when she cried.

The next chord made her scowl. She moved down an octave again, searching for the least insulting combination of notes. It made her chest tight. She gave up and moved on. The next chord was more offensive than the last.

When the tears started, she slammed out an angry melange of notes and bolted off the stool.

* * *

Somewhere in the two days it took her to return, the cover had been cleaned and replaced. She frowned at it, tracing her fingers across the piano’s edge, then lifting the flaps of the cover away from the instrument. It was clean underneath, too. Polished, even - everything pristine, stool included. Someone had heard. Will, or - 

The middle C was perfect - the G above repaired.

She exhaled swiftly, willing the breath into a laugh instead of a sob, and traced her fingers along the keys. “Thank you,” she murmured, as if to the piano itself.

“You’re welcome.” Low and rough.

She started at the first syllable, but rounded slowly to examine her old friend where he leaned against the doorframe when he finished speaking. “So you heard,” she said quietly, managing the smallest of grateful smiles.

“Sounded terrible,” grunted Biggie.

She caught herself on the name - the one Kate had started using. It was terrible, really. Still, his joke and the thought made her smile broaden a little.

He smiled somberly back, then moved forward slowly. “Been a long time since you played.” Something about his tone was inviting. He knew her.

“Twenty-three years,” she confirmed gravely, turning back to the piano with her head lowered, fingers gracing the keys.

“Twenty-five or so before that,” he added, lumbering over to a shelf and choosing a book. “You used to play, when I first arrived. This song, sometimes.” His broad hands smoothed the pages against the stand. “Chopin. Waltz in A minor. Then you stopped. But not in a bad way.”

“Are you saying I don’t play well?” she managed to joke, moving her right hand into place for the piece.

“Sit. Remind me.”

She lowered herself obediently to the stool, adding the left hand with some trepidation. The tempo was slow, her fingers fumbling over the quicker runs. Stopping abruptly at an incorrect chord, she shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he said, suddenly somber again, but encouraging. “Play the other one again. Moonlight Sonata.”

“I really shouldn’t have an audience. I’m not - ”

“You play; I’ll listen,” he insisted, tugging a nearby chair a little closer and lowering himself stubbornly down into it.

Helen observed him for a long moment, pursing her lips. He gazed pointedly at her until she turned back to the piano again.

Obedient again, she played the first arpeggio, the chord. Mondscheinsonate. What she could not see in her head, her fingers remembered. It wasn’t a difficult piece.

She didn’t realize until she had finished the entire first movement that she was crying again.

He did not interrupt her, and she did not speak until she thought she could do so without her voice hitching too much. “Was there a book of Ravel over there?”

“Hmm. Think so,” he replied. The shuffling of pages told her he was searching. “Yes.”

“Pavane pour une infante défunte.”

He patiently flipped through pages. “For an infant,” he muttered thoughtfully, a note of question at the end.

"Pavan for a dead child," she replied, holding her voice forcibly steady. He moaned quietly, a sorrowful sound from behind and beside her, and she swallowed. "Put it here."

"Helen..."

"I probably can't play it anyway," she murmured, making an excuse of it and waiting for the pages to be smoothed in front of her. Slow enough, but with two lines for the right hand, wide intervals, the staccato of the one line...

She fumbled her way through the first thirty or so measures before dropping her head, lowering her hands into her lap. Bigfoot's steady breathing behind her was soothing in a way she had not expected. She had thought she would be alone. "It reminds me of my mother," she said at last, carefully and quietly. "The piano. Playing it."

"You play when you're sad," he observed, finally indicating the understanding they both already knew he had. But she shook her head suddenly, making a sound of disagreement. "No?"

How could she explain her use of the piano once every quarter century or so? She sat, pensive and silent for a moment, and then it occurred to her that it was quite simple, really. And didn’t he deserve to know how his arrival had affected her? She had played until the first time he made her laugh. Played again for a while before Ashley was born. Played again now. "I play when I'm lonely."

A series of his quiet grunts greeted her as he lowered himself to the chair again, and she waited, tracing her fingers across the edges of the piano’s keys again until he spoke. “Is it healing?”

Yes, she thought. It was good for her. The piano didn’t require words. And her mother visited her when she played. She nodded silently, thumbing the middle C and letting it fill the room for as long as the instrument could maintain the pitch. She’d left it alone because she thought she would never play it again; now she was glad that he had heard, and had it restored for her. Then, finally: “It’s a release.”

They sat in silence for a long while. She felt a little empty, but comforted. The Sanctuaries would repair, rebuild, move on. _She_ would move on. For now, she was calm - eyes dry, cheeks sticky with old grief that she’d wash away as soon as she left this room. She took a deep, steadying breath and exhaled slowly.

To her old friend, it was a cue.

“I’ll keep the place tidy. Make sure the piano gets tuned up right.” Then, with a roguish tone, he added, “You’re not gonna like how much the repairs cost.”

Despite herself, Helen laughed - quietly, facing him with a smile. Suddenly, she felt warm again. “I’ll be sure to take it out of your next paycheck.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Angie (featherxquill) for her eternally awesome willingness to read/beta my work as meticulously or as casually as I desire. Damn, but she's good at fine-tuning those notches.


End file.
